Sub menu

Tag Archive for romance languages

Shayna Beaumont ’19, an environmental studies and Hispanic literatures and cultures double major from New York, has been selected as a finalist in Map the System, a global competition that asks participants to research the ecosystem of an issue they care about.

Her project, “Food Justice as a Platform for Environmental Equality in Harlem” tackles the issue of food deserts in the neighborhoods of East and Central Harlem in New York City.

“All my life I’ve grown up in food deserts where the unhealthy fast food chains and liquor stores are advertised, instead of healthy eating,” she said in a Coexistdaily blog. “My project is definitely a culmination of life experiences and how environmental studies is a social issue that needs addressing—not only for the white middle- and upperclass people branding the Green Movement, but from the underprivileged black and brown bodies that are victims of the systemic environmental racism that exists to this day.”

More than 110 Wesleyan students, faculty, alumni, and local guests participated in the second annual Power of Language Conference, April 26-27 at the Fries Center for Global Studies. The event was open to the entire Wesleyan community.

The two-day event featured six panels that focused on: Creative Language Learning, Crossing Time and Border through Translation, Language and Society, Language in Curriculum, Arabic in the U.S., and Polyphony through Literature.

“The presentations ranged from class final projects (such as a comic version of Dante’s Inferno, reimagined at Wesleyan) to senior theses (such as the challenges of translating early modern Spanish into accessible contemporary English),” said Steve Angle, Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies and director of the Fries Center for Global Studies. “Taken as a whole, the presentations captured the challenges and rewards of working with the world’s languages.”

Douglas Charles, professor of anthropology, professor of archaeology, says “we don’t know” the answer to this question because of limitations in fossil records. However, he says that there are indications of tuberculosis, leprosy and tumors found in ancient human and Homo erectus skeletons.

Wesleyan’s University Relations staff and most Finance staff will move to the Main Street building as part of the University’s strategic facilities plan. This move further strengthens ties between the University and the community.

In addition, one faculty member was promoted to full professor:
· Nicole Stanton, professor of dance

Brief descriptions of their areas of research and teaching appear below:

David Constantine’s research examines the relationship between dynamics and geometry – what the geometry of an object can reveal about its dynamics, and what the dynamics of an object can reveal about its geometry.

Anthony Braxton, the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, Emeritus, is profiled. Among other ongoing projects, Braxton has spent much of the past four years working on his newest opera, “Trillium L,” which, he says, “is a five-day opera”—if it is ever performed.

“Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world’s first comprehensive Encyclopédie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity—for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century’s accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality. One of Diderot’s most attentive readers during his lifetime was Catherine the Great, who not only supported him financially but invited him to St. Petersburg to talk about the possibility of democratizing the Russian empire.”

Organizing the biography by theme, “Curran vividly describes Diderot’s tormented relationship with Rousseau, his curious correspondence with Voltaire, his passionate affairs, and his often iconoclastic stands on art, theater, morality, politics, and religion. But what this book brings out most brilliantly is how the writer’s personal turmoil was an essential part of his genius and his ability to flout taboos, dogma, and convention.”

Andrew Curran

Curran is a fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine and a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. At Wesleyan, he also is professor of French and chair of Romance Languages and Literatures. This spring, he’s teaching French Composition and Conversation.

Curran also is the author of two previous books, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe and The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment.

Four poems, translated by Distinguished Professor of Literary Translation and Poet in Residence Norman Shapiro, appear in the November 2018 Vol. III edition of the international esoteric journal, Better Than Starbucks!. This poetry magazine is edited by American poet and translator Michael Burch.

Andrew Curran, the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities, has received the 2018 Prix Monsieur et Madame Louis Marin from the Académie des sciences d’outre-mer for his 2017 book L’Anatomie de la noirceur [The Anatomy of Blackness], which was published by Classiques Garnier.

This prize, which is given by the French Académie des Sciences d’outre-mer, recognizes an outstanding work in the social sciences. The Académie des Sciences d’outre-mer was founded in 1922 and has conferred the Prix Marin since 1976.

A play translated by Elizabeth Jackson, adjunct associate professor of Portuguese, was performed at Yale Cabaret Oct. 25–27. The play, titled “Agreste (Drylands),” is a Brazilian tale of love and loss, desire and death, ignorance and violence, written by Brazilian playwright Newton Moreno.

Based on true events, “Drylands” is a poetic narrative set in Brazil’s suffocating and desertified northeast. Three storytellers share with the audience their accounts and reenactments of a moving love story between two young farm workers that unravels in perplexing ways, as their intimacy becomes the subject of local gossip, and the memories of their relationship are ransacked by a conservative, violent, and deeply fragile community.

The New Haven Review published a review of “Drylands” on Oct. 28, noting that “with its ensemble presentation, the play is simply fascinating to watch, its story seeming to be spun from the air around us.”

The “Drylands” translation was completed during a playwriting conference at Wesleyan in February 2012 titled “Contemporary Conventions, Cultural Innovations, Playful Traditions.” The series of talks, performances, and readings culminated in Wesleyan’s first conference on playwriting pedagogy and creative processes. Moreno was an invited international guest.

This is the second play by Newton Moreno that Jackson translated. In February 2017, the Yale Cabaret staged her translation of “The Meal: Dramatic Essays on Cannibalism,” which tells three stories about people consuming—and being consumed.

In the book, Ponsavady aims to answer the question: How are the pleasures and thrills of the automobile linked to France’s history of conquest, colonialism, and exploitation in Southeast Asia?

Ponsavady addresses the contradictions of the “progress” of French colonialism and their consequences through the lens of the automobile. She examines the development of transportation systems in French Indochina at the turn of the 20th century, analyzing archival material and French and Vietnamese literature to critically assess French colonialism.

The prize is awarded annually by the National Library of Colombia and the Colombian Ministry of Culture to a short story collection in Spanish that has been published the year before by authors from the Spanish-speaking world (Spain and Latin America). This year, the jury selected 14 titles from 127 submissions.

This award is considered the most important prize in the short story genre in the world of Hispanic letters and honors the life and work of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The prize, which will be delivered in Bogota at the beginning of November, is endowed with $100,000 for the winner and $2,000 for each of the four finalists.

Ospina’s book, Azares del Cuerpo (Fates of the Body), was published by Laguna Libros in 2017. Like migratory animals, the female protagonists in this collection of short stories are travelers in search of new homes, hosts, and bonds of friendship and intimacy. Through the interrelated stories of women of diverse ages and origins who migrate to and from Bogotá, Ospina investigates the relationship between desire and the corporeality of the female body, and examines a multiplicity of modes of care and kinship outside of the bonds of family and heterosexual love. These stories about the limits of hospitality and the longing to cure one’s wounds by attempting to save other people also investigate the subtle ways in which broader histories of violence and migration shape people’s lives psychically and materially.

Care to brush up on your French? Learn Japanese? Or perhaps acquire a language that isn’t commonly taught at colleges, such as Danish?

Wesleyan is offering alumni and members of the on-campus community free access to the Mango Languages platform, says Antonio Gonzalez, professor of Spanish and director of the Fries Center for Global Studies. The platform provides high-quality online instruction in 72 languages, with an excellent blend of conversational language and cultural study. Gonzalez says that reception of Mango as a teaching and learning tool “has been very positive on campus” and that it is an attractive means for expanding the scope of Wesleyan’s language instruction.

“It’s crucial in any society for people to have intimate knowledge of different areas of the world, and not just in economically strong countries such as China,” he says. “An understanding of languages and cultures in Africa, Latin America and South Asia, for example, is essential in today’s interconnected world.”

We are SO excited to celebrate the graduating class of 2019 tomorrow! 🎓 Unable to join in person? Here's where you can watch the ceremony LIVE on Sunday, May 26 at 11 a.m. EST #Wes2019:
on Facebook 📱: bit.ly/2IP1Wto
on the Web 💻 : bit.ly/WesCommencemen…

Lots of great WESeminars today! Here's your chance to revisit the classroom this weekend and experience firsthand the academic excellence that is the essence of Wesleyan. Check out the schedule #WesReunion#Wes2019: fal.cn/ARoc